A common challenge encountered by contact center teams is high workload coming from incoming tickets and customer queries, such as what a product is, how to use it, what company developed it, and other questions of the same nature. Answers to such questions could be better automated with canned responses to lessen the number of tickets coming in. Combining a high workload with repetitive tasks results in substandard productivity and fluctuating customer service quality.
Along with understanding the key to good customer service skills, your company should invest in the right support tools. Having a help desk software is good, but having one with a knowledge base (KB) management feature is better to address the problem above.
In this article, you’ll learn the knowledge base definition, why it is important to every business, and, ultimately, how to create a knowledge base. We’ll also dive into features to consider when looking for a knowledge base solution and the qualities that make a good one.
Table of Contents
Knowledge Base Definition
A knowledge base serves as a self-service portal that customers can access for any query and product-related question. It is a repository of information that includes everything about the business, important facts about each department, product guides and usage, FAQs, and more.
There can also be an internal knowledge base for employees from which they can get information whenever they need it to help customers or resume business processes. Unlike a customer knowledge base, an internal knowledge base can contain confidential information about the company and its products and services. They can also be useful to the onboarding of new members of the team.
Businesses create and develop their knowledge base so they can be one step ahead of their customers on product-related issues, providing in-depth knowledge and solutions. The information can be collected from previous transactions using a CRM software, perhaps, or uploaded by contributors who know the ins and outs of the product, including common issues that are encountered by users.
Source: Salesforce Research
How Modern Knowledge Base Software Helps Your Business
Creating a knowledge base is a tedious process. But a knowledge management software solution can make the process a lot easier. One good example is Freshdesk, a cloud-based helpdesk solution with a built-in knowledge base platform. What you can do with a knowledge base can be endless. As opposed to a simple documentation space, a modern knowledge base helps you create multiple KBs, both internal and external, and even limit access to select employees if you need to. Aside from that, you can tailor your knowledge base design to fit your business’ branding.
When looking to build integrations with other apps, software solutions like Freshdesk enables you to use other tools to enhance and create a more comprehensive and even interactive knowledge base. You are not limited to text, as you can also embed images and videos to support the discussion. Lastly, a modern knowledge base lets customers do accurate searches, and employees view big data analytics to understand customers and draw important business decisions based on the data.
Try out Freshdesk with their free trialFreshdesk
Importance of Knowledge Base
Increase team productivity and efficiency
This does not mean a knowledge base can replace the customer service department; it should be created and used as a tool to eliminate repetitive questions so that the team can focus on critical tasks. With the lessened workload, along with the use of the best tools and apps to maximize productivity, it ensures heightened efficiency among teams.
Reduce queries coming in
Contact centers receive hundreds upon hundreds of ticket queries in a day. But when you start to look at each query, you can see that almost all of them can be matched with an automated response. With a knowledge base readily accessible, customers can look for answers themselves, saving customer support teams hours of manual work from answering tickets.
Shorten customer wait times while improving customer satisfaction
When it comes to customer retention, customers prefer an option to self-serve, rather than spend half an hour being directed to different agents. Unlike contact centers, support is 24/7. Having the problem solved at first contact is what makes a business more trustworthy.
Improved engagement to drive sales
A Harvard professor named Gerald Zaltman wrote a book on “How Customers Think” and suggested that 95% of the customer’s purchasing decision is subconscious. For customers to remember your brand and actually complete the purchasing decision, engagement, and interaction with your company should be facilitated.
Freshdesk Dashboard – Converting agent replies to solution articles
How to Create a Knowledge Base
When businesses decide to include a knowledge base, often, the first thing they do is to look for a knowledge base template or copy knowledge base examples. But even before you start using one, consider planning the structure and content, deciding on the list of topics to include, planning the customer’s journey in navigating the contents, etc. Let’s discuss each one by one.
1. Decide on the type of your knowledge base and who can access it
2. Build a rough list of topics to include
Titles like Getting Started, Terms and Conditions, FAQs, and How-Tos are common categories found in a knowledge base. To help you decide on the list of topics, draw inspiration from other knowledge bases. Ideally, you can find good ones from competitors or businesses from the same industry. By building a rough list of topic ideas, you can identify topics you need to focus on, and also make sure that no content duplicates another one elsewhere in the KB.
3. Come up with a structure
Customers will not be able to find what they are looking for with a chaotic knowledge base. Hence, it’s a crucial step to come up with a structure before you even start to create content. Decide on the core elements of your knowledge base. For instance, Freshdesk knowledge base allows you to categorize articles into a three-level hierarchy. On top are the main categories that contain different folders, grouping solution articles with similar content. During this step, you can organize content and plan the user’s journey when exploring the knowledge base.
4. Write the content
It’s also important that you write recyclable content so that it can answer different queries. Another crucial point to add here is to optimize your content with meta tags, and searchable keywords for search engine discoverability.
5. Cross-link articles (if possible)
During the process of writing the solution articles, you will find that a lot of these are interrelated and can be linked with each other. If you have carefully planned the navigation of your knowledge base in the initial steps, accomplishing this step will be manageable.
6. Add visuals
You are no longer limited to just writing solution articles in plain text. Enrich your content with images, video tutorials, and other visuals.
7. Update Content
Always make sure that you have up-to-date information in your knowledge base. Appoint someone to revisit your content regularly. Better yet, you can add this in the process of the customer service team to flag outdated content.
8. Share content and ask for feedback
To help improve the quality of content, share it through your businesses’ social media profiles, and ask for feedback. Happy customers are more than willing to share their input on products that they enjoy and care about.
A good knowledge base software should allow you to categorize articles with ease.
Features to Consider in Knowledge Base Software
You will find a lot of tools and solutions in the market that will help you create and build a knowledge base. When out searching for one to buy, there are some features that you will want to particularly look for:
Article Visibility Access
Look for software that allows you to limit access within the internal knowledge base, aside from creating both an internal and external knowledge base, which is accessible to employees and customers, respectively.
Helpdesk Ticket System
Freshdesk is one of the great options if you’re looking from a list of the best helpdesk ticketing system. It converts customer queries into tickets that are easily managed, filtered, and assigned to the right agent who is best to handle the concern. Natively built-into a helpdesk system, your knowledge base can create inquiry solutions in the form of videos, images, and attached files. Freshdesk, for example, has an Email-to-KBase capability which converts agent replies into solution articles. You will find that customer queries are good content ideas to draw from, as these are real-time concerns encountered by customers.
Answer Bots
One of the benefits and uses of having a chatbot in your frontline support is getting you quick answers to urgent concerns. While you add product-focused pages, you will want to also to integrate your knowledge base into a chatbot. The upside to this is that your knowledge base is even more easily accessible through chat. Customers can know about your product even when they are reaching you through social media platforms. However, it might require an integration of NLP tools where a combination of keywords pulls up the right responses.
Discussion Boards and Communities
Dedicating a place on your website for discussion boards lets customers ask and even answer each other’s questions among themselves, while also allowing agents to take part in conversations. Agent responses can also be converted into solution articles.
Freshdesk Dashboard – Creating a new article
What Makes a Good Knowledge Base?
Going beyond answering what should a knowledge base contain, some essentials make a good one.
Intention
To inform customers and address a problem with a solution should be the primary intention when developing a knowledge base.
Aside from describing what a product is, you can also explain why such features exist in a certain product. It should also provide solutions to common issues encountered in your product.
Easy to navigate
Planning the customers’ journey inside the knowledge base should be done carefully and before starting to write guides, articles, etc.
Every topic must be placed under categories. Having a table of contents and simple titles means they can be found both on SERP and your website.
Digestible, simplified Copy
You should write articles in chunks so that they are simplified and digestible. There should be only one article per specific topic so customers won’t be bombarded with information while reading different pages.
A step-by-step instruction, for example, should be able to teach customers doable actions on how to accomplish a task. The clearer and more digestible your instructions are, the faster you can give the solution; therefore, the happier customers will be. Adjusting the tone based on the reader’s current knowledge about the topic makes for a good knowledge base.
Up-to-date
As products get improved or get full revamps, update your knowledge base so that they are congruent with each other. Let readers comment on your content, to see if articles have addressed a problem, or if it needs improvement. Customer feedback can be your QA with their feedback. You can also link articles within the knowledge base for further reading.
Ready to create a knowledge base?
Now that you have a solid background about what a knowledge base is and what it does, and how to plan out what to include in your content, the next step is to decide which tool can help you speed up the process of creating one.
When you create a knowledge base, tools like Freshdesk give you a solid foundation as you build your content. More importantly, it can scale with your business as queries pile up. You can try out the Freshdesk free version to get a feel of using software to build your knowledge base from scratch.
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